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The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-pief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for
Nightwood, her peakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most pilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before
Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.
Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and
New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women “‘
tragique’ and ‘
triste’ and ‘tremendous’ all at once,” of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, “[Barnes’s] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive—spectacularly, grotesquely alive.”
Table des matières
Foreword
A Night Among the Horses
The Valet
No Man's Mare
Oscar
The Rabbit
The Doctors
Smoke
The Terrorists
Who Is This Tom Scarlett?
Spillway
Indian Summer
The Robin's House
The Passion
Aller et Retour
A Boy Asks a Question
The Perfect Murder
Cassation
The Grande Malade
Dusie
Behind the Heart
A Note on the Texts
A propos de l'auteur
Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) was born on Storm King Mountain in New York State. She worked as a journalist during World War I before leaving the United States to spend the inter-war years in Paris and London among the most celebrated writers and artists of the twentieth century. She returned to New York in 1941 and lived in Greenwich Village until her death. She published three novels as well as short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, skits, and a three-act play between 1914 and 1950.
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at the
New Yorker.
Résumé
The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.
